Is the world ready for a black Bond?

Bond strolled through the crowd on Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, Jamaica. As he passed by the rum shack over looking the bay, he caught the eye of a dazzling creature with emerald eyes and hazel skin. She was no darker than 007. While the girl may have been mixed race, there was no doubt that the British agent was black. His features, and above all his hair - neatly flattened with pomade but with clear potential for dreadlocks - indicated as much. Bond sat next to the girl and ordered a rum and coke. Appleton, not Mount Gay.

That is the Bond film that is yet to be made, the one that may never be. 007 has been around for five decades, yet despite his incarnations springing from all over Britain - a Scotsman (Sean Connery), an Irishman (Pierce Brosnan), a Welshman (Timothy Dalton) and two Englishmen (Roger Moore and Daniel Craig) - no Briton of African-Caribbean descent has packed a Walter PPK on her Majesty's Secret Service. A black Bond is still beyond the pale. But even an Australian, in George Lazenby, was acceptable.

We seem to have come tantalisingly close, though. Remember that tall, handsome and distinctly non-blonde hero who was M's chief of staff in the last three 007 movies? Colin Salmon, also impressive as the lead in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, was hotly tipped to take over from Brosnan. But Craig got the gig.

Colourblind casting may be a laudable ideal in cinema, but tradition rather than innovation is the order of the day in the Bond franchise. Craig's debut in Casino Royale comes at a time when the west is at war and Bond remains the most glamorously potent emblem of western intelligence.

So what colour do we imagine our champion to be? He can't simply be descended from a former British colony, because the world's greatest secret agent is a quintessentially imperialist figure. Ian Fleming's original texts make that clear. When a British couple is killed in Jamaica by dodgy Cubans in For Your Eyes Only, Bond barks: "If foreign gangsters find that they can get away with this kind of thing, they'll decide the English are as soft as some other people seem to think we are." Indeed, 007.

Is a black man, who could be mistaken for a foreigner at home and a native abroad, up to the monumental task of proving that Blighty's not soft? More to the point, would he be given the power to do so?

Reggie Hammond, Eddie Murphy's lovable rogue in 48 Hours, said: "I'm your worst nightmare, I'm a nigger with a badge." A black Bond is a greater psychosis - with a license to kill, drive impossibly flash motors, and screw his way around the globe. The unabashed sex tourism of the Bond aesthetic, a potent reinforcement of its imperialist dynamic, only makes sense if an Anglo-Saxon beds the babes of the world. The paradigm implodes if the sex tourist himself is too exotic.

In the very unlikely event of Salmon or, say, Adrian Lester actually becoming 007, the scriptwriters would have that and other head-scratching dilemmas to solve. They would have to somehow determine the ratio of blackness to Britishness in a black Briton. Our society hasn't cracked that one yet.

If the fantasy of a black Bond visiting Jamaica were to come true, how much "local colour" could he feasibly accommodate? Would he speak patois? Is the rum-and-coke cliche acceptable? Do black people drink martinis? It's a debate sure to leave many viewers shaken and very stirred.